Skywatcher Photos Catch Stunning Northern Lights Display

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A surprisingly vivid display of the northern lights dominated the
night sky in recent days, offering dazzling weekend light shows
as far south as Nebraska for observers with clear weather,
according to skywatchers.

The northern lights show flared up on Saturday (Feb. 18), when a
stream of particles from the solar wind slammed into the Earth's
magnetic field to trigger what was by all accounts a magnificent
aurora.

Malone snapped amazing
photos of the northern lights display as the auroras danced
over Lake Superior. It was a frigid night in the single digits on
the thermometer, but well worth the wait, she said.

"Superior is just dim enough to allow for a long exposure of 17
minutes to capture star trails revolving around the North Star,"
Malone said. "I only stayed seated in my Adirondack chair for
half of the exposure, as I had to get up and move around to keep
warm, hence the transparent appearance of myself!"

Another of Malone's photos shows a couple walking a dog under the
auroras as a plane flies high overhead.

"Can only wonder what the view must have been like from the
passing plane, pictured as a streak middle frame," Malone said.

According to astronomer Tony Phillips, who runs the skywatching
website Spaceweather.com, the weekend
aurora light show was visible far beyond the normal far northern
latitudes.

"Northern lights crossed the Canadian border and descended as far
south as Nebraska in the United States," Phillips wrote in a
Sunday aurora alert.

Auroras are created when charged particles from the sun
interact with Earth's upper atmosphere, giving off a glow that
can be seen by the unaided eye. The solar particles are funneled
over Earth's poles by the planet's magnetic field, making auroras
typically visible at latitudes in the far north or south.
Southern auroras are known as the southern lights.

Skywatchers were not the only ones to take advantage of
Saturday's amazing auroras.

NASA launched a rocket into the northern lights display late
Saturday as part of an experiment to measure the effects of
intense aurora activity on signals from global positioning system
satellites and other spacecraft. The small suborbital rocket
blasted off from the Poker Flat Research Range just north of
Fairbanks, Alaska, to probe a 6-mile (10-kilometer) section of
the northern lights, which stretched from horizon to horizon, the
researchers said.

This story was corrected to reflect that Shawn Malone is
female.

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